


Every Kind of Light

by mumuinc



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, No discernible plot, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 08:33:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8243015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: Two years after Ronan and Adam break up, Ronan shows up at Adam's workplace.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm not quite done with writing smut. Here, have another one.

The campus bookstore was the last place Adam expected to meet Ronan Lynch. It had been a few years since they had parted ways, not really, in Adam’s opinion, the most genial sort of way that long-time friends who have had life-altering experiences. Adam considered witnessing one of their friends die and get resurrected, Ronan himself almost dying, Adam’s body taken over by a demon, just some of the few life-altering experiences that would probably never leave him even has he forged a path to normal life in adulthood. But there were some things that he had been completely ready to give up.

Like the almost masochistic need for him to continue to have a relationship with his parents.

Like the dangerous on-again-off-again relationship he’d carried on with Ronan the first year after Glendower, and Gansey dying and being alive again.

It wasn’t that he didn’t love Ronan when he left Henrietta and decided never to come back. He did. He still did.

But he was tired of the fights, which were just as spectacular as the sex, because Ronan and Adam never did things halfway. It was the endless bickering over Ronan’s general possessiveness and Adam’s need for freedom and control over his life. Over school. Over money. Over every little thing that should have been inconsequential considering everything that they had been through, but somehow blown out of proportion the minute they decided they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. It had been a rollercoaster ride that almost resulted in Adam completely flunking out within the first semester of college, and Ronan almost blowing up the Barns. The fights just escalated until spring break of Adam’s first year, and Gansey took a chartered plane from wherever he and Blue and Cheng were on the West Coast to get back to Henrietta just so he could mediate.

That, Adam thought, had been the killing blow, because he couldn’t stand Gansey looking at him like he had back in the Barns, on Ronan’s birthday, the night Ronan had first kissed him. He couldn’t stand that Gansey had looked at Ronan the same way and told him to apologize. Ronan Lynch did not apologize. And Adam Parrish was not going to forgive him without an apology. Gansey left Henrietta frustrated. Ronan stormed back into his room in the Barns and shut out the rest of the world. Adam went back to Cambridge and never looked back.

Except when he did.

Adam spent the next two years of college burying himself in obtaining his degree with an obsessive fervor so he could forget about Ronan, forget about the quiet feeling he always had when they walked hand in hand in the fields in the Barns, forget about Cabeswater, the ley line, and everything they had all been through in high school. It wasn’t easy. Boston was close by and there was a ley line there, and even though Adam was  _ not _ tied to this ley line, he could feel the ebb and flow of its energy in his veins. Some days, he thought he could get through it. Some days, it felt a little too close to home that he could feel the crackle of energy, the soft whisper of Latin in his deaf ear. Some days, it felt like the soft tickle of Ronan’s hair, nuzzled just under his nose as they fucked, the whisper of dream fireflies buzzing around his head in the middle of orgasm. Some days, Adam couldn’t take it at all. And some days, Adam didn’t know what it was he really wanted, whether he just wanted to get over it or he wanted Ronan back.

Just one more year in Harvard, he would remind himself. And then he could move somewhere else that didn’t remind him of Ronan and the Barns and home.

But now, in the middle of his school bookstore shift, Ronan had walked in and all the distance Adam had steadily cultivated over the past two years slid right out from under him, like a rug being pulled and he felt the crash like a break in his hipbone falling all over his ass.

Fuck, but Ronan looked good.

He looked exactly as Adam remembered him before he left Henrietta: head freshly shaved, lip curled into a sneer, the hooks of his tattoo snaking up the neck of his biker jacket as he swaggered across the shelves, glancing disinterestedly at the merchandise. His eyes were cool, looked older somehow, when they met Adam’s. His cheekbones threatened to cut through the cold spring air.

“Hey,” he said, and Adam heard the same timbre of voice that Ronan always used that was just for Adam to hear.

Adam’s throat felt suddenly dry as he shoved his hands in the pockets of his work pants. “Hey.” He didn’t know what to say, if he even had to say anything. What was Ronan doing in his bookstore, looking all casual and hot and  _ fucking hell, get a grip of yourself, Parrish, you’re at work. _

“Matthew’s checking out schools,” Ronan said by way of explanation when Adam didn’t do anything more than to raise a colorless eyebrow.

“Oh,” said Adam, not knowing what else to say.

Ronan turned to look at the book display. These were art books. Adam had just finished labeling them with price tags, and stacking the books properly on the shelves.

“Don’t think this is the right place for him though.” He sniffed, picking up a book on vintage art, and looking at Adam with a strange look on his face. “Is it too pretentious?”

Adam shrugged. He didn’t think it was pretentious, but then again, Ivy League had always been Adam Parrish’s dream. And anyway, he was still the scholarship kid, so there was nothing pretentious about that.

“Depends. What does Declan say?”

Ronan snorted, turned to the book in his hand to flip through the pages. Adam vaguely realized the art book was of sketching the human body. “How does his opinion count for anything?”

“I guess it depends on what Matthew thinks.”

Ronan didn’t answer that, and merely held up a page in the book. It was of drawing hands. Adam remembered how much Ronan had loved his hands. “This what you learn around here?”

He rolled his eyes. He knew well enough that Ronan knew what Adam’s major was. They’d fought about it often enough whenever school was ever brought up. “My degree is in engineering; we don’t do art.”

Suddenly, he couldn’t take it: Ronan being here in the bookstore, talking to him all casually like it was just another spring day at the Barns, talking to him like the two of them hadn’t thrown so much vitriol at each other they day they broke up, talking to him like they were still  _ friends _ . And maybe they were, but it wasn’t what Adam wanted right now.

He shook his head just as the door chime of the store tinkled, a signal that there were other people coming in. “I have to get back to work.”

Ronan nodded and didn’t look back at him.

Adam moved back to the counter. There were a couple of students milling on the shelves, picking through the history book selections, the fiction, the student work. Adam tried to put the thought that Ronan was still in the store out of his head as he rang up purchases. He had almost succeeded, near the end of the shift, when Ronan came up the counter. He had a few poetry and fiction books in his hand.

“Didn’t know you learned how to read when I was gone.” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them tumbling out.

Ronan shrugged. “Not a lot to do when you’re not in college.” There was no trace of the usual sarcasm in his voice.

Adam tried not to stare as he rang up his purchases. He tried not to let their fingers brush when Ronan handed him his card. He tried not to look up to see if Ronan was also looking at him, maybe stealing glances from beneath the heavy sweep of his dark lashes. He tried not to think about the fact that Ronan was even here, in Harvard, buying books from a bookstore that Adam worked in, at all.

When he looked up to hand back Ronan’s card and receipt, he had mostly convinced himself that Ronan wasn’t here to see him. And that he didn’t want to see Ronan here either.

Ronan had a brow raised as he looked back, and took his purchases, card and receipt. Their fingers brushed. Adam snatched his hand away a little too quickly.

“Well, see you around, Parrish.”

He didn’t want to see him around.

Except when he did.

Ronan looked a little out of place standing in the middle of his dorm common area, looking at the bulletin board in obviously staged fascination. He’d taken off the biker jacket because it was warm in the dorm building, and in his muscle tee and artfully torn black jeans, Ronan looked more like a Calvin Klein model than a Harvard undergrad. Adam tried to skirt around where he stood, so they wouldn’t crowd. There was no one else in the common room.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked, unable to keep the resentment out of his voice. This was the second time they’d run into each other in the space of the same number of hours. This couldn’t be a coincidence.

Ronan didn’t look at him. “Matthew’s checking the housing situation.”

“How do you know I live here?” Adam said, suspicion trumping the desire to run to his dorm room to hide from everything that Ronan represented, as he stood in the common area of his dorm. Ronan had never accompanied him to campus, even when they were together. It had always been Adam returning to him at the Barns.

“I asked around, Parrish.” Ronan finally turned to look at him. Adam felt strange, a bit defensive at how instantly comfortable Ronan appeared in his dorm. It had taken him weeks to even get around being comfortable in his own room, months to have any sort of casual relationship with his roommate. He was already in his junior year and he still didn’t have friends. Ronan was here a couple of hours and he looked perfectly at home.

“Do you want to get out of here?”

He blinked. “Are you seriously asking me out again?”

Ronan scuffed his booted feet on the linoleum. “Well, it doesn’t look like you’re going to invite me in, so…”

Adam fought the blush that sprang to his cheeks at the thought of Ronan in his dorm, maybe on his bed, and lost when he felt the tips of his ears heat up. Ronan was looking at him expectantly.

“Just…” He shrugged. “I need a few minutes to get changed.”

He let Ronan follow him inside his dorm room. His roommate, Patrick, was hunched over one of the desks. Patrick nodded at Adam and Adam introduced Ronan as a friend from high school. Ronan ignored Patrick and set himself comfortably on Adam’s bed. Adam disappeared into the bathroom to shower quickly, change into more casual clothes, brush his teeth and look at himself in the mirror, hoping he didn’t look too shabby for a night in town with Ronan Lynch.

His pinched face stared back at him balefully. He had gained some weight since going to college, the meal plan that came with the scholarship assured that Adam Parrish got the minimum three square meals a day now. He wasn’t the scrawny little runt from high school anymore, but he was still slender, his face still strange and always looked just this side of stressed, his freckles ever present and ageing him down considerably. He wondered if Ronan had any plans to try to win him over again.

He didn’t think he could handle keeping his hands to himself if they were ever going to be alone together. Adam was not over him, even after two years.

They left in the BMW, which was parked illegally outside Adam’s dorm. Ronan didn’t get a parking ticket at least. Ronan drove them to Boston and Adam didn’t mention anything. He was too busy trying to ensure his hands were carefully on his lap, away from Ronan’s hand on the gearshift. He didn’t try to look over, didn’t try to meet Ronan’s gaze even though he knew he kept turning from the road to Adam to steal glances, because he was too afraid of what he would find there.

They went to one of the city parks, hiked among the trees until the sun went down, and then ate hotdogs from a street vendor for dinner. They talked, because there was nothing else to do in each other’s company. Ronan told him about the Barns, about Opal and Chainsaw. Adam smiled and missed their company. Adam told Ronan about school, nothing much really, because all Adam ever did was work and study. He didn’t have friends, but he did mention the one time in sophomore year, when Blue and Gansey and Henry had visited him. It was a few months after he and Ronan had broken up. Gansey had insisted on the visit because he was concerned over Adam’s mental state after seeing him in Henrietta. Ronan listened quietly as Adam described his melancholy, not so much in words because Adam would never talk about himself, but in the minute movement of the muscles in his face, in the twitch of his fingers as he talked about the Boston ley line. Adam knew that even after two years, he was a wreck, and sitting on a park bench in early spring, his hands feeling cold and chapped without gloves and cursing his forgetfulness at having completely forgotten them, he could admit to himself that he was still in love with Ronan Lynch.

He didn’t say it out loud, but he knew Ronan knew it too.

So it wasn’t too big of a surprise when Ronan finally asked, “Are you… have you tried to see anyone else?”

Adam didn’t know if this was a rhetorical question because he didn’t even have any friends, and the one time he tried to go on a blind date through the college network, he had been so disgusted with himself, at the thought of casual sex that he had disappeared on his date right after dinner. They never made it to the hook-up part of the “date”.

“I don’t know if appointments with my therapist counts,” he mused darkly, smiling despite himself. And he couldn’t help himself because he thought he had to know, so he said, “Did you?”

Ronan nodded, not looking at him. His gaze was far off, into the darkness of the barren trees still waiting for the first leaves of spring to unfurl. “Yeah. Yeah I did.”

Adam nodded too. He didn’t know how to move on from there. He’d thought that maybe Ronan had been just as devastated by their break-up as he had been, but clearly, he knew how to get over himself, and he could move on from Adam if he really wanted. They sat in silence, staring into the gathering darkness around them, looking past random strangers walking by, jogging through the park.

“Matthew’s not really here, is he?” he asked softly. His pulse beat frantically in the long minute of silence that Ronan bowed his head and didn’t answer.

A long moment passed in which he thought that maybe Ronan had completely forgotten what he had said. He wished he hadn’t injected so much hope in his voice. The silence felt like a knife cleaving through that tiny spark and reminding him that yes, Ronan had probably moved on, had most likely moved on, if his seeing other people was any indication. And yet.

“No.” And Ronan’s voice was almost too soft that Adam had almost missed it. And he spoke again, louder, more confident, darker, more Ronan. “No, he’s not here.”

Adam turned to look at him, and he found that Ronan was already looking. In the cold glow of the park lights, Ronan’s eyes were almost black with only a sliver of blue, shining in the light, like a cat’s eyes. Adam leaned forward and Ronan met him halfway into the kiss.

It was dark and familiar, warm and tasted like leather and gasoline and Henrietta summer nights. It was everything Adam had dreamed about in the past two years that he had not gone back. Ronan kissed him like he had never left, like neither of them hadn’t almost tried to kill each other all those years back. Like they hadn’t need Gansey’s help to set things right. Ronan kissed him like he still loved him.

When Adam pulled back to try to catch his breath, Ronan chased after his lips, his cold fingers snaking around Adam’s neck to pull him closer, tangling in his hair, breath ghosting over his jaw as he planted reverent kisses on Adam’s face, unmindful when they heard catcalls from strangers that passed them by. He kissed Adam like he didn’t know if he would suddenly disappear, and Adam clung to him like a lifeline, wondering if this was what forgiveness felt like.

It was a long moment before Ronan finally pulled back, his eyes half-lidded, lips red and parted, cheeks flushed. Adam remembered Ronan’s face in post-coital haze and it looked a little like this, and the thought drove him wild. He didn’t want the night to end, but Ronan was getting up. He held a hand out to Adam, who took it, relishing the feel of Ronan’s hand in his. It felt like a memory. He didn’t want to let go.

And in the space of that time when they kissed and now, it started to snow. A soft and light fall of powdery white that melted on Adam’s lashes as they fell. Ronan kissed it off his nose and forehead and lips.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ronan said, pulling him up, suddenly cool and casual once again, but for the heat in his eyes as he looked for any sign of resistance in Adam’s gaze.

There was none.

They ended up in Ronan’s hotel, a quaint, cozy affair in the waterfront district. The room was tiny, compared to the suite that Gansey and company had stayed in when they came to visit Adam, and it appeared Ronan had been staying here for a couple of days at least, if the sight of his dirty clothes littering the carpeted floor was any indication. Maybe he was working up the courage to face Adam again. Maybe he was just stalling. Adam didn’t know but he didn’t really care either. What mattered was the here and now.

Adam allowed himself to be pushed in, thankful for the indoor heating that brought the feeling back into his fingers. They were starting to go numb. He allowed Ronan to close the door, to pin him against the door and kiss him passionately, like the past two years had not existed, like they had only seen each other at the Barns yesterday. He let Ronan pull back momentarily, helped him take off his jacket, and then his shirt, let Ronan peel off his own biker jacket and muscle tee, and then it was the heat of the bare skin of their torsos pressed together as Ronan kissed him over and over until neither of them could catch their breath, and Adam felt light-headed and weak in the knees, and Ronan pulled him from the door and pushed him to the bed.

He fumbled with unbuckling his belt and pulling it off the loops as Ronan made quick work of the button and fly of his jeans, hooking his thumbs over the waistband of Adam’s boxers and yanking it off impatiently with his jeans. He didn’t know what he had been thinking but he was already hard and Ronan’s hands, hot and impatient on him, made him harder still. It was almost too good when the hands were replaced with the warm, welcome wetness of Ronan’s mouth, the slide of his tongue unbearably hot. Adam felt like he was going to combust as heat and desire and need pooled in his belly, to be soothed only by Ronan’s touch.

He whined when Ronan pulled back with a gentle patronizing pat on his stomach, and then Ronan was also pulling his jeans off, peeling off his boxers and leaving it on the floor. Adam watched him with growing impatience mixed with frenzied desperation as he bent to pick something up from his jeans and toss it against Adam’s chest and it took him a moment to realize it was lube and condoms and fuck yes, Adam was certainly down with that.

Hazily, at the intrusion of the first finger questing inside him, he thought that he must have died walking somewhere between the bookstore and his dorm, and he had gone to heaven or what substituted for it if he was being finger-fucked into a cheap hotel bed by Ronan Lynch, and in the next moment, as the next finger slid in, Adam decided he didn’t care if he was dead. If this was heaven, he was willing to take every kind of light it had to offer, as Ronan’s fingers scissored and stretched and quested and found what they were searching for. Adam screamed and clutched the bedsheets, his vision bleeding at the edges as he saw Ronan position himself above him, eyes half-lidded with desire, his lips parted as he whispered into Adam’s good ear.

He thought he heard Ronan say “I love you,” but it was lost on the sensation of him bottoming out. And when he moved, it was all Adam could do not to scream again as discomfort blossomed into pleasure and exploded in sensation as he moved against the harsh rhythm of Ronan’s hips. The cries that spilled from Ronan’s lips were guttural and unintelligible. They may have been curses or prayer or just Adam’s name whispered reverently in cadence with their movement. Adam sighed and bit his lip to swallow his own cries of pleasure, his fingernails digging into the skin of Ronan’s ass as he moved and pushed insistently, needing to take it harder, faster, deeper, as Ronan’s hand snaked between them to jerk him in time with the movement of their hips.

When Adam came, it was with a sob, his body contracting and bringing Ronan down with him in an explosion of sparks, electricity and vision bleeding white. He thought he heard a sigh in Latin in his deaf ear, Cabeswater reaching out to him even this far from the Henrietta ley line, as he rode the waves of his orgasm.

They lay in spent silence for a long time, Ronan collapsed over Adam, until Adam felt his limbs going to sleep and Ronan pushed himself off of him, stumbled into the bathroom and cleaned both of them up with a warm washcloth, before collapsing back beside Adam on the bed, their cooling bodies close but not touching. The spell was over and the awkwardness between them, as in the bookstore encounter, was back.

Adam turned on his side to face Ronan. In the dim pin lights of the hotel room, Ronan’s sharp features were in stark relief, cold and handsome and everything Adam had ever wanted.

“I still love you, you know,” he said quietly, his fingers seeking out but not quite touching Ronan’s hand.

“Hmm,” said Ronan, his voice non-committal. “I guess you wouldn’t let me fuck you if you didn’t.”

Adam snorted, sitting up, suddenly tired of it all. He didn’t know where he stood now. “You’re an asshole.”

Ronan’s hand found his, and his touch was gentle. Quieting. Adam stilled. “I… I want to try again.” He looked at Adam, and Adam thought he heard the soft hitch in his voice, the tremor of tears in the corner of his eyes. “If you’ll still let me.”

He didn’t answer. Just twined their fingers together and sank back into the bed, exhausted, and stared at Ronan until they fell asleep.

Ronan checked out of his hotel the next day and drove Adam back to his dorm. Adam’s roommate was making coffee when they arrived and Adam told Patrick that Ronan was staying over the remaining three days until spring break before Adam went back with him to Virginia for the holiday. Patrick took one look at their entwined fingers and told Adam that he would spend the remaining days at the library to cram for exams.

On his last day of class, Ronan picked him up at school, greeted him with a kiss and a cup of overly expensive coffee that Adam glared at until it was shoved under his nose, and herded him into the car.

“Let’s go home,” he said, and Adam couldn’t find himself wanting anything more.


End file.
